Word: greed
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...beginning all the world was America." John Locke's 300-year-old phrase still keeps its haunting simplicity. For generations, America meant the part of the earth that was not corrupt, not worn by labor, tainted by inequality or poisoned by greed. This myth of paradise-on-the-frontier pervaded 18th century ideas about America and, by the mid-19th, had become one of the chief regulating ideas of America's discourse about itself: "That unfallen, western world," as Melville wrote in Moby Dick, "which to the eyes of the old trappers and hunters revived the glories...
...know it is a decadent prosperity, that of a civilization that has lost its way and can find security only in the worship of gold. It is as if Miamians were playing the final scene of an epic morality play in which, led astray by egocentrism, complacency, and boundless greed, those who dreamed of Miami as the tropical Zion destroyed the dream for themselves and for others. As a Coral Gables schoolteacher said after reading reports of the McDuffie riots, "We've got trouble in paradise, but Miami is no longer paradise...
...tourists have always brought in most of Miami's money, and when Miami Beach's popularity began to decline in the 1960's, the area began to grow desperate. Florida has always been more than ordinarily susceptible to greed, perhaps because of its newness; in a city where "old Miami" arrived before 1950, the only thing that separates the worthy from the unwashed is wealth. Miamians will go to great lengths to show off their wealth: It is a city of huge diamonds, Cadillacs and 80-foot yachts. California may be the birthplace of the "me generation" and Boston...
...hypocritically criticize capitalism that provides this largesse for them," Gordon B. Worcester writes to his class. But Elliot, a lobbyist, emerges with an opposite view, "I reached the never-to-be-reversed conviction that Uncle Sam's taxing authority utilized to balance our economy by curtailing greed and dishonesty and developing social benefits and policies...was the only means which could effectively reverse the Depression and permanently carry forward the just, honest economy we ought to enjoy so as to maintain full employment...
...remarkable intensity. Picasso painted Gustave Coquiot, a fashionable Paris art and theater columnist, as a sinister god of urban pleasure, green shadows straining against red lips in a pale mask of a face. Some of the women, their faces blurred by laughter or squinched up into pug masks of greed, seem to predict by ten years the jittery misogyny of German expressionism. Woman in Blue, 1901, with her fierce little Aubrey Beardsley whore's head surmounting the dress of a Velázquez court portrait, is an especially compelling example...